Week #11 Journal

This week we mostly learned more about integrating musical activities into children's literature and the many different and creative ways it can be done. We learned how you can integrate different subject areas as well as music and non-music concepts into a children's book so you can teach the children something while they are having fun with the story. A teacher has to think of creative ways that music can be integrated into a children's story. For instance, on Wednesday we each played a different instrument together during the Chicken Little story, and each instrument represented a character in the story. Then on Friday we brought recyclable items to class and used them to create sounds of rain and thunder during the story Thunder Cake. It also allowed us, the students, to be creative in coming up with our own sounds that represented thunder. Creativity is important to young children, and teachers must do all they can do to enhance the creativity in children and not stifle it. ALso, by doing these fun things while telling a story, the children are more likely to pay attention to the story and learn something from it rather than let their minds drift off.
On Friday this week we also learned two new notes on the recorder, E and F. I thought these new notes were harder than ones we learned before because we had to use almost all of our fingers and my fingers got tired quickly.
This week we also learned what binary form is. Binary form is when a song is broken up into two different parts. One part, the A part, is the chorus of the song and the other part, the B part, is the bridge of the song. For example, when we did the hand jive in class to the Ray Charles song Hit the Road Jack, the song had a binary form. During part A, we did the hand jive and during part B we danced around with our partner.